Archive for October, 2005

These are comments from readers of KOS, who get why another black man’s posting a picture of Maryland Lt. Governor Micheal Steele in minstrel paint, is at best bigoted and at its worse, racist.

If some right wing blogged pulled the same stunt, even to make the same point about a Dem, we’d be going ape-shit. That was an extremely irresponsible and offensive picture. Would you want your campaign ad next to that?

I don’t understand why bloggers feel it’s okay to post whatever they want and don’t think they should worry about their advertisers. The advertisers of Drudge, for instance, should not be there – he’s a slime merchant.

When is it ever a good idea to post a minstrel picture? Eek.

If a white blogger had put up a caption of “Sambo” and a minstrel face he be SOL and Kos would be calling for a boycott of his blog. Don’t deny that truth.

Accepting people using cheap racist potshots just because they’re a minority isn’t necessary. Take the high road and acknowledge that being black doesn’t magically make what he did right.

Tell you what. Democrats should just run that imagery every time there is a black Republican against one of them. They could include your little explanation of historical significance of the image as a disclaimer of racism. And if people still think it is offensive, Dems can just accuse them of ignorance.

Does that sound like a good idea?

This isn’t a Sista Souljah deal, where a white candidate attacked a black woman for her statements about white people. Kaine’s people dissed Gilliard for crudely insulting a black man.

Minstrel makeup goes a bit beyond just “criticizing a black politician.” It’s a rhetorical – or “artisitc” – bomb. It carries tremendous emotional significance. I think it would be naive not to expect people not to have powerful emotional reactions – many of them negative – to such an image.

WASHINGTON – Virginia’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate pulled campaign ads from a bloggers’ Web site Thursday because the blogger had derided a black Republican candidate in Maryland as “Sambo.”

The campaign of Virginia Lt. Gov. Tim Kaine ordered the campaign ads pulled after it became aware of the Web site’s attack against Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, who announced for the Senate earlier this week.

Over a story about the announcement, the blog ran a headline saying, “Simple Sambo wants to move to the big house.” A photo of Steele was doctored to show him with white eyebrows and moustache and thick red lips. A caption under the photo said, “I’s simple Sambo and I’s running for the big house.’ ”

The blogger, Steve Gilliard, said the Kaine campaign had paid for a month of ads. He defended his attack on Steele and, after the Kaine campaign’s action, changed the Web site again to feature an attack on Kaine as a “coward” for pulling the ads.

“I guess they have a problem with black people expressing themselves in print,” Gilliard said. “At no point did they bother to ask me what I thought or why I did it.”

No, they have a problem with bigots, hiding behind their racial identity, spewing their hatred and venom in print. So do I.

He said he made the attack because Steele has “refused to stand up for his people.”

Kaine’s campaign press secretary, Delacey Skinner, said, “We were obviously fairly upset about it and as soon as we could we discontinued the ads.”

She said the campaign has run ads on a number of different Internet sites. Ads on Gilliard’s Web site featured endorsements of Kaine from New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

Kaine is in a tight race in the Nov. 8 gubernatorial election with Virginia’s Republican Attorney General Jerry Kilgore.

University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato said the Kaine campaign clearly “did the right thing” in withdrawing the ads, but he said the attack on Steele illustrates the dangers of candidates using blogs to reach voters.

“The blogosphere is the wild, wild West of American elections. Candidates want to reach the blogs’ writers and readers, because almost all of them are voters and contributors. But the blogosphere is laden with nasty political traps, and this is a sad example,” said Sabato.

Probably the single greatest problem between blacks and whites in America is that we are forever witness to each other’s great shames. This occurred to me in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, when so many black people were plunged into misery that it seemed the hurricane itself had held a racial animus. I felt a consuming empathy but also another, more atavistic impulse. I did not like my people being seen this way. Beyond the human mess one expects to see after a storm like this, another kind of human wretchedness was on display. In the people traversing waist-deep water and languishing on rooftops were the markers of a deep and static poverty. The despair over the storm that was so evident in people’s faces seemed to come out of an older despair, one that had always been there. Here–40 years after the great civil rights victories and 50 years after Rosa Parks’s great refusal–was a poverty that oppression could no longer entirely explain. Here was poverty with an element of surrender in it that seemed to confirm the worst charges against blacks: that we are inferior, that nothing really helps us, that the modern world is beyond our reach.

Of course, shame is made worse, even unbearable, when there is a witness, the eye of an “other” who is only too happy to use our shame against us. Whites and blacks often play the “other” for each other in this way, each race seeking a bit of redemption and power in the other’s shame. And both races live with the permanent anxiety of being held to account for their shames by the other race. So, there is a reflex in both races that reaches for narratives to explain shame away and, thus, disarm the “other.”

Therefore, it was only a matter of time before the images of deep black poverty that emerged in Katrina’s aftermath were covered over in a narrative of racism: If Katrina’s victims had not been black, the response to their suffering would have been faster. It did not matter that a general lack of preparedness, combined with a stunning level of governmental incompetence and confusion, made for an unforgivably slow response to Katrina’s victims. What mattered was the invocation of the great white shame. And here, in white racism, was a shame of truly epic proportions–the shame of white supremacy that for centuries so squeezed the world with violence and oppression that white privilege was made a natural law. Once white racism–long witnessed by blacks and acknowledged since the ’60s by whites–was in play, the subject was changed from black weakness to white evil. Now accountability for the poverty that shamed blacks could be once again assigned to whites. If this was tiresome for many whites, it was a restoration of dignity for many blacks.

In the ’60s–the first instance of open mutual witness between blacks and whites in American history–a balance of power was struck between the races. The broad white acknowledgment of racism meant that whites would be responsible both for overcoming their racism and for ending black poverty because, after all, their racism had so obviously caused that poverty. For whites to suggest that blacks might be in some way responsible for their own poverty would be to relinquish this responsibility and, thus, to return to racism. So, from its start in the ’60s, this balance of power (offering redemption to whites and justice to blacks) involved a skewed distribution of responsibility: Whites, and not blacks, would be responsible for achieving racial equality in America, for overcoming the shames of both races–black inferiority and white racism. And the very idea of black responsibility would be stigmatized as racism in whites and Uncle Tomism in blacks.
President Johnson’s famous Howard University speech, which launched the Great Society in 1965, outlined this balance of power by explicitly spelling out white responsibility without a single reference to black responsibility. In the 40 years since that speech no American president has dared correct this oversight.

The problem here is obvious: The black shame of inferiority (the result of oppression, not genetics) cannot be overcome with anything less than a heroic assumption of responsibility on the part of black Americans. In fact, true equality–an actual parity of wealth and ability between the races–is now largely a black responsibility. This may not be fair, but historical fairness–of the sort that resolves history’s injustices–is an idealism that now plagues black America by making black responsibility seem an injustice.

And yet, despite the fact that greater responsibility is the only transforming power that can take blacks to true equality, this is an idea that deeply threatens the 40-year balance of power between the races. Bill Cosby’s recent demand that poor blacks hold up “their end of the bargain” and do a better job of raising their children was explosive because it threatened this balance. Mr. Cosby not only implied that black responsibility was the great transforming power; he also implied that there was a limit to what white responsibility could do. He said, in effect, that white responsibility cannot overcome black inferiority. This is a truth so obvious as to be mundane. Yet whites won’t say it in the interest of their redemption and blacks won’t say it in the interest of historical justice. It is left to hurricanes to make such statements.

And black responsibility undermines another purpose of this balance of power, which is to keep the shames of both races covered. It was always the grandiosity of white promises (President Johnson’s promise to “end poverty in our time,” today’s promises of “diversity” and “inclusion”) that enabled whites and American institutions to distance themselves from the shame of white racism. But if black responsibility is the great transformative power, whites are no more than humble partners in racial reform, partners upon whom little depends. In this position they cannot make grandiose claims for what white responsibility can do. And without a language of grandiose promises, the shame of white racism is harder to dispel.

But it is the shame of blacks that becomes most transparent when black responsibility is given its rightful ascendancy. When this happens blacks themselves cannot look at New Orleans without acknowledging what Bill Cosby acknowledged in a different context, that poor blacks have not held up their end of the bargain. Responsibility always comes with the risk of great shame, the shame of failing to meet the responsibility one has assumed. A great problem in black American life is that we have too often avoided responsibility in order to avoid shame. This is understandable given the unforgiving pas de deux of mutual witness between blacks and whites in which each race prepares a face for the other and seizes on the other’s weaknesses with ravenous delight. And four centuries of persecution have indeed left us with weaknesses, and even a degree of human brokenness, that is shaming. Nevertheless, it is only an illusion to think that we can mute the sting of shame by charging whites with responsibility for us. This is a formula for running into the shame you run from.

Today it has to be conceded that whites have made more progress against their shame of racism than we blacks have made against our shame of inferiority. It took nothing less than four centuries, but in the ’60s whites finally took open responsibility for their racism despite the shame this exposed them to. And they knew that ever-present black witness would impose on them an exacting accountability (Bill Bennett, Vicente Fox, Trent Lott) for diffusing this evil. But, in fact, racism has receded in American life because whites, at long last, took greater responsibility for making it recede despite the shame they endured. And wasn’t it the certainty of shame, as much as anything else, that had kept them rationalizing their racism for so long, looking to the supposed inferiority of blacks to justify an evil?
No doubt it is easier to overcome racism than an inferiority of development grounded in centuries of racial persecution. Nevertheless, if New Orleans is a wake-up call to government, it is also a wake-up call to black America. If we want to finally erase the inferiority that oppression left us with, we have to first of all acknowledge it to ourselves, as whites did with their racism. Our scrupulous witness of whites helped them become more and more responsible for resisting the shame of racism.

And our open acknowledgment of our underdevelopment will clearly give whites a power of witness over us. It will mean that whites can hold us accountable for overcoming inferiority as we hold them to accountable for overcoming racism. They will be able to openly shame us when we are not fully at war with our underdevelopment, just as Bill Bennett was shamed for no more than giving a false impression of racism. If this prospect feels terrifying to many blacks, we have to remember that whites witness and judge us anyway, just as we have witnessed and judged their shame for so long. Mutual witness will go on no matter what balances of power we strike. It is best to be open, and allow the “other’s” witness to inspire rather than shame.

Mr. Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author of “White Guilt” (HarperCollins), which will appear next spring.

I’ve been asking myself for some time now, “Why did Blacks switch to the Pary of the KKK and Racism”? And finally, I have found an explanation that was posted on Black People for Bush that I found interesting. Check it out with me and let me know what you think it accurately depicts how Blacks began voting for the party of Slavery and Hatred.

In 1929, one year after President Herbert Hoover took office with a promise to” put a chicken in every pot,” the stock market crashed, ouor nation went into a deep depression, and the republicans knew they were in trouble. This was the perfect opportuniy for the Democrats to take the White House, but they needed more than the Depression: they needed the black vote. During this same period, serveral black newspapers, including the baltimore Afro American, the Norfolk Journal, and the Pittsburg Courier had become very critcal of the Republican Party. As their collective circulation soared into millions, thse newspapers became a very powerful voice in the black community.

Prior to this time from 1866 to 1928, blacks had voted exclusvely for the Republican ticket. Frustrated with the economy, the newspapers used theri powerful voice to urge black voters to break traditon and vote Democrat. “The break was neither clean nore complete, however, for there were those who cousld not be presuaded to support the party that, after all was the party of the Ku Klux Klan and other bigots.”
On Election Day in 1933, the collective voices of the newspaper where heard and when the votes were counted, Democratic candidate Franklin D. Rossevelt was the new President of the United States. They voted Democrat beause the Pittsburg Couier and other poweful black newspapers told their readers the ‘Republicans took their vote for granted.”

Democrats have historically shown their contempt for Blacks by refusing to vote for civil rights and other constitutional protections.

Now that it’s no longer pc to express they racist speech in the open, Liberals have been using for decades Black agents who spew the Democrats racist message with assumed impunity. Those days are over and we are calling racism “racism”, no matter what permutation Liberals use.

Click on the link to see how modern Liberals view Blacks. [Highly Offensive] Don’t click on this link if you’re at work.

Whereas, You have inspired the modern civil rights movement by refusing to give your seat to a white man in opposition to the laws of the day in Montgomery, Alabama on December, 1 1955.

Whereas, Your arrest for said act of defiance not only lead to the ascension of the young pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but the end of legal segregation;

Whereas, Your lifelong example of grace and courage under fire has made you an inspiration to freedom-loving people everywhere;

Whereas, Your legacy is “the pursuit of Peace, Justice, Equality, Love and a fulfillment of what our lives should be”;

I Proclaim that on this date, October 25, in the year of our Lord 2005, You are now and forever, the Mother of the Modern Civil Rights Movement for all people who yearn for freedom from the tyrannies of this life.

In my opinion, Governor Blanco and Mayor Ray Nagin are responsible for the loss of life in the state of Louisiana and New Orleans respectively. Instead of providing leadership, Blanco was emotionally incapacited and Nagin was hysterical.

“The Bennett Brouhaha, The New Orleans Nightmare, And Me” is a new article by Steve Sailor in the Oct. 2nd issue of VDARE.COM. It was inspired by Bill Bennett’s recent comments on the promotion of social benefits as a rationale for opposing abortion. Sailor writes:

When Peter Brimelow asked for my opinion of Jared Taylor’s white nationalist critique of me, I was reminded that out of the hundreds of thousands of words I write each year, I devote relatively few to ideologizing and exhorting—the main stock in trade of so many writers more popular than me.

I’ve always been more interested in reality than morality.

I think I have a certain knack for coming up with new insights into how the world works. Yet, at least by the self-confident standards of opinion journalists, I’m not all that strongly motivated to proclaim how it should work.

I have the personality of a born staff man. My natural predilection is to lay out the logical alternatives in a situation rather than to either make the decisions myself or to propagandize the masses.

I was struck by that again when the absurd Bill Bennett Brouhaha broke out last week, because I had indirectly set it off many years ago.

All last month, ever since the New Orleans Nightmare became evident on September 1st, the hysteria built among the political and media elite over which of them would crack first and mention the elephant in the living room: that blacks have higher average crime rates.

Finally, it has burst forth in a spasm of irrational and self-righteous denunciations of former Education Secretary William J. Bennett.

The triviality of the triggering incident reflects the tensions bottled up within the media.

On Bennett’s talk radio show, a caller claimed that legalized abortion damaged Social Security’s financial health. The pro-life Bennett doesn’t like pragmatic arguments against abortion, feeling abortion should be opposed even if it had positive effects. As an example of how the caller’s approach could be turned against anti-abortion activists, Bennett cited economist Steven D. Levitt’s popular theory (in his bestseller Freakonomics) that legalizing abortion had cut the crime rate.

“But I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could—if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.”

Bennett was immediately roasted alive by the Great and the Good. Many of them fraudulently claimed Bennett had endorsed genocide.

I felt a little responsible for his plight. According to Bennett, he had been introduced to the abortion-cut-crime theory six years ago in a debate in Slate.com between Levitt and myself.

Funny thing— although I am constantly being accused of being a “eugenicist” (despite my long record of expressing strong concerns about eugenics), for half a dozen years I have been perhaps the leading opponent of Levitt’s crypto-eugenic logic.

Levitt argued in his 2001 article with John J. Donohue:

“Fertility declines for black women are three times greater than for whites (12 percent compared to 4 percent). Given that homicide rates of black youths are roughly nine times higher than those of white youths, racial differences in the fertility effects of abortion are likely to translate into greater homicide reductions.”

My objection to Levitt’s racial eugenic argument is not on moral grounds, but on factual ones. In the real world, the direct opposite of his theory’s predictions actually happened: the first cohort born after abortion was legalized in 1970-73 grew up to be the most violent teens in recent American history, with a homicide rate triple the last cohort born before abortion was legalized. Among African-American 14-17 year-olds, the murder rate more than quadrupled.

But what I’ve learned in the six years that I’ve been diligently punching empirical holes in Levitt’s theory is that virtually nobody, on either the pro-choice or pro-life sides of the enormous debate over abortion, cares about facts.

Both sides mostly want Levitt’s theory to be true. Many pro-lifers want to feel virtuous for opposing legalized abortion even though it makes them safer from crime.

In contrast to the hundreds of hours I’ve spent digging up the facts about abortion’s impact on crime, I’ve seldom offered a strong opinion on the morality of abortion. That’s because I’ve never noticed that I had much that’s unique to contribute on the question.

Everybody is entitled to an opinion on morals, and I don’t see any reason that mine should count for more than other people’s do.

What moral principles I do frequently promote tend to be basic ones. For example, as a journalist writing for a fairly elite audience of adults, my code is simple in the extreme:

Tell the truth.

And that’s what Bill Bennett just did.

Steve Sailer, is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website http://www.iSteve.com features site-exclusive commentaries.

Excerpt from Secretary Rice’s comments at the Brunetta C. Hill school in Birmingham, Ala. on Sunday.

“Now things are different. Rice said Friday that Birmingham “has come a long way — light years — from when I lived here.”

She said the city might not have escaped its racist ways were it not for democratic institutions that enabled compromise to prevail over conflict.

“At one point, not that long ago, the promise of democracy seemed distant here in Alabama and throughout the American South,” Rice said in a speech at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

“But when impatient patriots in this country finally demanded their freedom and their rights, what once seemed impossible suddenly became inevitable. So it was in America. So it was in much the world. And so it will be in the Middle East.”